M.I.T. has just announced it is expanding its list of free online courses anyone can take. Attendees earn completion certificates. M.I.T.'s OpenCourseWare project already offers 2,100 courses used by 100 million people. OpenCulture, Free Ed, E-learning Center, and Alison offer competing free online courses, including many on computing and IT certification.

I ~knew (hardly knew, just "yeah, those were around" out of one random bunch, without looking hard) only one or two who seriously ended up close to CERN. Most don't really do that much with physics.

Anyway, this will be probably the century of ~biochemistry, ~biotechnology, and such - that's where we know little / there's much to be done / it's damn hard.
(~physics is a fairly "done" deal, in comparison)

PS. And "get ahead", that you mention in a post just below, is a zero-sum game - how too many people get taken by it, into thinking that should be the goal, is possibly even one of the main issues; perhaps precisely what leads to more or less sweatshops, for many.